First’s first
First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City now has its first female senior pastor.
As Sarah Stewart watched a female pastor deliver a powerful sermon at a Texas church, her own conviction to become a preacher was strengthened. The Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell was the first woman that Stewart had ever seen preaching in the pulpit of a Baptist house of worship. As a student at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University, Stewart visited Calvary Baptist Church in Waco because she knew Pennington-Russell was the church’s senior pastor. “For the first time, I was seeing that, and it was like the Lord opening my eyes. I had no idea that was possible,” Stewart said. “She was so at home in that pulpit, and she brought all of who she was to that moment and that service. There she was pastoring a room full of people of all ages, seminary professors and students and Baylor students. It was beautiful to see,” Stewart said. That memory from her seminary days rose to the surface recently as the minister discussed her acceptance of a new and historic ministry
position in the metro area.
Stewart, 36, was named the new senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City on Oct. 21. She is the historic downtown Oklahoma City church’s first female pastor in its 128-year history. She will preach her first sermon as senior pastor on Nov. 18.
A Stillwater native, Stewart has had connections to the church, 1201 N Robinson, through the years. She served as a ministry intern there in 2007 and was ordained as a Baptist minister in 2008 by the Rev. Tom Ogburn, who was First BaptistOklahoma City’s senior pastor at that time.
Stewart served as youth pastor at churches in Norman and Rosebud, Texas, before she and her husband, Brad, returned to Oklahoma City, where she began serving as young adult pastor at First Baptist. The ministry couple — Brad Stewart is also an ordained Baptist minister — have three sons: Noah, 8; Luke, 5; and Griffin, who will be 2 soon. Both Stewarts are graduates of the University of Oklahoma and earned their Master of Divinity degrees at Truett seminary, and Brad Stewart currently serves as First Baptist’s minister of discipleship and young adults.
Sarah Stewart served as First-Baptist’s minister of young adults for 10 years before members of the church’s pastor search committee approached her in June 2018 to ask her to consider submitting her name for consideration as the church’s new pastor. The Rev. Mack Roark has been serving as the church’s interim senior pastor since the departure of former senior pastor, the Rev. Kent Berghuis, who accepted the senior pastor’s post at First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio, in 2017.
Stewart said she prayed about the decision for six weeks before submitting her resume to the committee.
The church held “The Call Weekend” on Oct. 20-21 to give Stewart an opportunity to visit informally with members at what she described as a town hall type gathering on Oct. 20. The next day, she preached a message based on the parable of “The Good Samaritan” during the Sunday worship service. Stewart noted proudly that the Rev. Molly Marshall, a trailblazing female Baptist preacher from Muskogee, was in the audience.
After that worship service, First Baptist members voted unanimously to call Stewart senior pastor. In prepared statements distributed to church members, the pastor search committee affirmed its reasons for bringing Stewart before the congregation for a churchwide vote.
“I believe in Sarah, but more importantly, the God we worship believes in her and has called her for this purpose,” committee member Jerry Reese said.
Another committee member, Victoria Malony, said she had been inspired by her “front-row” view of Stewart’s ministry.
“Through Sarah, God has done amazing things in the young adult group, and I look forward to seeing what He has in store for our church the next season,” Malony said. “I am confident that God will use Sarah and our church to do great things in our community.”
Stewart said one of the church members at the town hall event said she believed Stewart had been called to lead the church “for such a time as this,” quoting the Book of Esther.
Stewart said she felt peace about it all as soon as she told the search committee she wanted to be considered for the pastoral role.
“In the last 10 years that I have been here, my calling has not been about my gender at all. It’s clear that I have been called to pastor. I’ve known that since I was about 23 years old, and in this place, in this church, I have been welcomed and embraced as a minister of the Gospel. So it hasn’t been about being a female. It’s just about who the Lord called,” she said.
“Now I will be the first female pastor of First Baptist Church, and that’s an honor and it’s exciting. I have a lot of gratitude to the men, to the pastors that came before me, that laid that foundation to make this possible. This church has always been a light in our community. It’s always been a place that has been advocating and believing that anyone can be called to serve the Lord, and so it’s an honor that I get to step into that role and serve as the first female pastor.”
Stepping into history
For 17 years, First Baptist-Oklahoma City had been poised to choose a female senior pastor.
In 2001, the church famously left the Southern Baptist Convention, rejecting the denomination’s refusal to ordain women, among other concerns. The church voted to end its 87-year affiliation with the SBC, in part, because it disagreed with the SBC’s doctrinal platform called the Baptist Faith and Message, updated in 2000, which said “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Despite that highprofile split from the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the church continued to call men to the senior pastor’s post — until now.
No one is more aware of this historic moment than Stewart.
She said it is surreal to see her call to the pastorate fulfilled at First Baptist-Oklahoma City. She pointed out that the desk where she will undoubtedly work on her weekly sermons is the same desk where the prominent Southern Baptist evangelist Herschel Hobbs drafted the Baptist Faith & Message of 1963. Hobbs, now deceased, served as the church’s beloved pastor for more than 20 years before retiring in 1972.
Stewart said she’s been asked many times over the years why she didn’t leave the Baptist faith for one that ordains women. The Episcopal Church USA, Presbyterian Church USA and United Methodist Church, to name a few, ordain women, and it isn’t uncommon to see a woman serving as senior pastor at their churches.
Stewart said she was “born in the Baptist Church” and grew up attending University Heights Baptist Church in Stillwater. The question of sticking with the Baptist faith tradition came up often among her female friends in seminary who also felt called to pastor.
“We met together regularly, and that was often a question on the table: Are you going to stay Baptist because how is the Lord ever going to fulfill this calling on your life if you stay with the Baptist Church?” Stewart said.
Though some of her friends who felt called to pastor no longer ascribe to the Baptist faith tradition, Stewart said “I chose to stay Baptist because it’s who I am.”
“I believe in the priesthood of the believer, that’s an important thing to me, and local church autonomy. So I chose to follow the Lord in the tradition that I believe in and leave it in His hands to open the door whenever the time is right.”
Heart for community
After its departure from the Southern Baptist Convention, First BaptistOklahoma City joined the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an organization formed by Southern Baptists dissatisfied with what they considered the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination’s leadership in the early 1980s. The church currently is part of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Oklahoma, but it continues to maintain its affiliation with the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, the Southern Baptist Convention’s state affiliate.
Stewart described First Baptist as a small church (with roughly 200 members) that has had a strong connection to the Midtown area since it was formed in 1889. She said the congregation voted twice in its history to remain in the area instead of moving to the suburbs because it cares about the community.
She said the congregation’s heart for the surrounding area is shown through its Care for OKC ministry, which provides food and clothing to the needy, and its Good Shepherd Ministries, which provides medical and dental services to the impoverished and working poor. The church’s sprawling building also is home to at least three other church groups and Christian organizations, which Stewart called “a blessing.”
She said most of all, she loves the church’s inclusive atmosphere, which means it’s OK to “come as you are.” The church is full of people with a diversity of ideas and perspectives, she added.
“You don’t have to clean up your life before you walk into this place. It is a place where people have found transformation in their relationship with God,” Stewart said.
“I also love that we don’t all agree. There’s a lot of diversity here. It’s OK to come to this place and bring your doubts and questions. It’s a safe place to ask questions. We look to Scripture together, and we bring who we are in our thoughts and our perspectives together, and it’s a safe place to do that. So we are growing together.”